{"id":57217,"date":"2019-01-04T20:49:06","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T20:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57217"},"modified":"2021-08-18T22:50:29","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T22:50:29","slug":"what-makes-me-black-what-makes-you-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57217","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Me Black? What Makes You White?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Makes Me Black? What Makes You White?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture<\/a>
\nVolume 20, Number 2 (Summer 2018)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nMr. Prejudice<\/em> (detail), 1943, by Horace Pippin<\/a> (1888\u20131946); gift of Dr. and Mrs. Matthew T. Moore\/ Philadelphia Museum of Art\/Art Resource, NY; \u00a9 estate of Horace Pippin.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

W. Ralph Eubanks<\/strong><\/a>, Visiting professor of English and Southern Studies
\nUniversity of Mississippi<\/em><\/p>\n

The obelisk<\/a> bearing the chiseled gray-granite face of a Confederate<\/a> soldier enters my field of vision each morning as I stroll across campus. After forty years away from Mississippi<\/a>, I returned last year to teach at my alma mater, Ole Miss<\/a>. Having entered the University of Mississippi<\/a> in 1974, only twelve years after James Meredith<\/a> shattered the color barrier, I was one of about fifty black students in a freshman class of more than 800, African Americans then making up less than 5 percent of the entire student body.<\/p>\n

During my time as a student at Ole Miss, the culture, heritage, and traditions of the university stood as obdurate barriers to a black person attempting to feel part of the university, much less at home in it. And though Ole Miss and the state of Mississippi more broadly have since made certain commendable strides in reckoning with the past, the statue is a reminder of how the forces of race and history remain in constant collision, and of how the misinterpretation of the past can sometimes overshadow historical reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost white Americans are obviously and often all too unconsciously committed to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant<\/a> supremacy,\u201d wrote the essayist and critic Albert Murray<\/a> more than forty years ago in his enduring reflections on our nation\u2019s \u201cmulatto<\/a>\u201d culture, The Omni-Americans<\/a><\/em>.1<\/sup> What we are witnessing today, however, is quite conscious. I don\u2019t mean here simply ugly and even violent displays, such as the now infamous Unite the Right rally<\/a> in Charlottesville<\/a> last summer, but something more insidious. This new iteration of racialized politics is one that dares not say its name. It even pretends that race-based discrimination and white supremacy are things of the past, issues well behind us. More brazenly\u2014one might even say cynically\u2014this new politics appropriates the language of the civil rights movement<\/a>, and does so precisely to undercut some of the movement\u2019s signal accomplishments (including voting rights<\/a>), or at least to prevent some its goals (including equal as well as integrated schools) from being fully achieved…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race is an absurdity, having long ago been discredited as a valid biological category and, in the Brown decision, a defensible legal one. Yet as a means of defining and separating people, it retains its power. That power can\u2019t be undone simply by pretending it doesn\u2019t exist, or even by telling African Americans that they should desist from \u201crace-holding\u201d as an excuse or crutch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,23674,20],"tags":[29224,20762,29223,29222,679],"class_list":["post-57217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-hedgehog-review","tag-mississippi","tag-the-hedgehog-review","tag-the-hedgehog-review-critical-reflections-on-contemporary-culture","tag-w-ralph-eubanks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57217"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61285,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57217\/revisions\/61285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}